Healthcare Survey Urges Employers to Look at Their Space on the Web

TMP recently conducted a national survey to find out how clinical healthcare professionals use the Web when looking for a new job. Included within the research were people from with clinical background and a variety of job titles that included RNs, Imaging Specialists, PT/PTA, OT/OTA,SLP, Pharmacists, and Respiratory, Clinical Lab Professionals. The survey was presented to a broad age range and those who worked in different types of facilities - from community hospitals to assisted living facilities to teaching hospitals - and everything in between.

Specifically, we found an online presence to be crucial to recruiting anyone in the healthcare field. Sixty percent of the respondents have Internet access at work and at home, and 67% have used the Internet when conducting a job search. Moreover, an astounding majority of the people polled, 44%, preferred to apply for a job directly to a hospital through email or the hospital's website, rather than going through a job board, faxing or mailing a resume, or using another method (see chart 1).

We learned that 41% of healthcare job seekers surveyed will visit a specific healthcare institution's website and more than 26% of the respondents will not pursue employment at a hospital if that hospital does not have a careers section as part of its online information. Do you wonder how these healthcare job seekers come across a particular site? Well, the research showed us that the leading referral method was search engines like Yahoo and Google, with magazines/trades journal and newspapers a distant second (Chart 2.)

Chart 2- Healthcare Job Seekers Preferred Job Search Method.

The results in Chart 2 speak for themselves - driving candidates to your corporate employment website through Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not only just one nice component of your recruitment strategy - but rather, it's a completely essential piece to making healthcare hires and achieving a successful recruitment strategy. To learn more about our survey findings and how TMP can help you strengthen your healthcare organization's employment website, please contact Jill Erickson at: jill.erickson@tmp.com or call 312-321-5811.